Kontakt

Education

Responsibilities

Conduct systematic and biogeographic studies on various groups of plants within the coffee family (Rubiaceae).

Responsible for curating the Rubiaceae collections at S Herbarium.

Organize and lead field collecting in Madagascar (once a year) and identify and prepare labels for new collections.

Supervise postdoctoral researcher and PhD students.

Research

As a plant systematist and evolutionary biologist, my main interest is biodiversity of tropical forests. Overall, my research has two main but interrelated components: 1) phylogeny and how phylogenies can be used for understanding evolutionary patterns, historical biogeography, and conservation needs; and 2) plant taxonomy and classification. My research activities focus mainly on the systematics of the coffee family (Rubiaceae), and this has been done in close collaboration with Prof. Birgitta Bremer (now retired), Professor Catarina Rydin, and many international collaborators. I am also involved in other systematic projects on the flowering plant families Balsaminaceae, Boraginaceae, Gesneraceae, and Melastomataceae.

My main research question is: how can phylogenies (Tree of Life) be used for understanding evolutionary patterns, historical biogeography, and conservation needs?

One important prerequisite for a better understanding of the evolutionary history of a particular group of organisms is to develop an explicit phylogenetic framework for the group. I have reconstructed and continue to generate phylogenies of different groups of plants at different taxonomic levels, using DNA standard sequence data from different nuclear and chloroplast markers and a range of phylogenetic methods. The phylogenetic hypotheses (resulting phylogenies) are used as frameworks:

for assessing relationships among taxa;

for pinpointing the phylogenetic positions of enigmatic taxa;

for basing new classifications;

for addressing ecological, evolutionary, and biogeographic questions; and

Projects

Project I. Phylogeny and historical biogeography of the species-rich, pantropical Psychotrieae alliance (Rubiaceae), with particular emphasis on the Western Indian Ocean Region (submitted to American Journal of Botany), in collaboration with Prof. Birgitta Bremer.

Project III. Evolution and biogeography of the tribe Anthospermeae (Rubiaceae) (in progress), in collaboration with Olle Thureborn (PhD student, Stockholm University) and Prof. Catarina Rydin (The Bergius Foundation of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences).

Project IV. Phylogeny and generic limits in the Neotropical tribe Coussareeae (Rubiaceae) (in progress), in collaboration with Dr. Stefan Löfstrand (postdoc, The Bergius Foundation of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) and Prof. Catarina Rydin (The Bergius Foundation of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences).